Thursday, November 30, 2017

That’s what people often say, meaning it takes a certain kind of person,
with a supersized ego and laser determination, to put oneself through the
political wringer.

President Donald Trump proved he had the moxie to win the White House. Now
his performance in the Oval Office is drawing new questions about his sanity.

When the 2005 “Access Hollywood” tape surfaced last year, Trump admitted
saying the vulgarities about women. He apologized and called it “locker room
talk.”

But recently he changed his tune, telling a senator the voice on the
tape wasn’t his and he didn’t say those words, The New York Times reported.

More than a dozen women have come forward to accuse Trump of inappropriate
behavior. The charges have rolled off his back, even as many powerful men in
the entertainment and media industries have lost their jobs.

He’s Teflon Don, one of Trump’s accusers said. The White House position
is that every one of the women is lying.

Trump endorsed Senate candidate Roy Moore and seems to admire the way the
Alabama Republican has steadfastly denied all allegations of sexual
impropriety.

Trump reportedly has returned to a favorite conspiracy theory of old, strangely
reiterating his claim that Barack Obama was born in Kenya – after acknowledging
last year that the former president was born in the United States.

Trump clings to the notion that he lost the popular vote only because there
was widespread voter fraud, although no proof of it has been found.

At a White House ceremony Tuesday honoring the Navajo code talkers, he showed
his impulsiveness and lack of filter when he made a crack about Pocahontas, his
nickname for Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts.

And his sharing three inflammatory, unverified, anti-Muslim videos on
Twitter Wednesday was so far outside the norms of presidential behavior as to
be inconceivable. Except that for Trump, tacit endorsement of the far-right,
racist Britain First group was sadly par for the course.

“It was wrong for the president to have done this,” said a spokesman for
British Prime Minister Theresa May, who added that Britain First uses
“hate-filled narratives to peddle lies and stoke tensions.”

But Trump won praise from David Duke, former Ku Klux Klan leader, who tweeted:
“Thank God for Trump! That’s why we love him.”

Thumbing his nose at an ally, Trump tweeted to May to mind her own
business.

During the campaign, Trump’s many GOP competitors as well as the news
media, Obama and Hillary Clinton questioned his mental stability and warned of his
unfitness for office.

Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas,
called Trump a “pathological liar,” “narcissist” and “utterly amoral,” after
Trump attacked Cruz’s wife and father. Cruz later endorsed Trump anyway, and most
other prominent Republicans also fell in line.

This isn’t the first time a president’s mental health has come under
scrutiny. Richard Nixon was prescribed uppers and downers in an attempt to
control his moodiness.

Richard N. Goodwin, an aide to John F. Kennedy and
Lyndon B. Johnson, wrote that he studied medical books trying to understand LBJ’s
paranoid behavior.

Those interested in
Trump’s mental health can skip the medical texts. “The Dangerous Case of Donald
Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President,” a book
of essays, was published in October.

The authors concede no
definitive diagnosis is possible, but they say Trump exhibits signs of being a
malignant narcissist, a sociopath, paranoid and of having a delusional
detachment from reality, among other things.

“Anyone as mentally
unstable as Mr. Trump should not be entrusted with the life-and-death powers of
the presidency,” the authors write in the prologue.

Trump’s fans dismiss such
talk as politics as usual.

“Trump is NOT crazy
despite the claims of some mental health professionals” read the headline on an
op-ed by Andrew Snyder, a psychotherapist, on foxnews.com. Shrinks are calling
Trump crazy simply because they disagree with his policies, he said.

But you don’t have to
think Trump is crazy to find him reckless and rash. Not that Teflon Don is
about to change.

In Missouri Wednesday, he
was talking about taxes but could have been referring to his approach to the
highest office in the land.

Wednesday, November 22, 2017

After the post-Thanksgiving
buying spree of Black Friday, Small Business Saturday and Cyber Monday comes Giving
Tuesday, a day to give back.

On the Tuesday after
Thanksgiving, we remember the wisdom of the Beatles: Money “can’t buy me love.”
But giving it away can make us feel better.

Now in its sixth year,
Giving Tuesday raised a respectable $10 million online for charities and
nonprofits in 2012. Fueled by social media, it has grown and spread worldwide.

People in about 100
countries participated last year, raising $168 million for worthy causes, an
increase of 44 percent from 2015. The average contribution was about $108.

Giving Tuesday
encourages us to take a breath, reflect on what’s important and act on our values
by contributing time, energy or cash. Companies also participate, recognizing
that customers, especially millennials, like doing business with companies that
share their values.

Giving is so strongly
associated with our culture that the Museum of American History launched a
Giving in America project two years ago, collecting artifacts such as a March
of Dimes collection can and a bucket from the ALS ice bucket challenge that
swept the country in 2014.

The museum will
sponsor a day-long Giving Tuesday celebration in which kids and adults can
share how they give and why.

Facebook and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will match up to $2
million in donations to U.S. nonprofits through Facebook, which is also waiving
its fees for donations made on Facebook that day.

Observers credited the
rise in Giving Tuesday contributions last year partly to a “Trump effect” of
people speaking with their wallets following the election. The ACLU, Anti-Defamation
League and Planned Parenthood were among groups that reported spikes in donations.

The Trump effect
worked both ways. The Donald J. Trump Foundation raised $2.9 million last year,
nearly as much as it did in the previous four years combined. It donated about
$3 million to nonprofits, mostly to veterans groups, distributing more last
year than it had in the last three years combined, The New York Times reported
Monday.

Trump hasn’t actually
contributed to his own charity since 2008, but a couple of deep-pocketed donors
wrote checks for $1 million each. Trump announced he’s shutting down his
foundation, though he hasn’t yet, according to the Times.

Giving Tuesday isn’t
political and it doesn’t accept or distribute contributions. It encourages each
person to choose a favorite charity, donate on the charity’s website and
publicize the choice on social media with the hashtag #givingtuesday.

It was founded in New
York by the 92nd Street Y, a cultural and community center in New
York, in partnership with the United Nations Foundation. Founder Henry Timms, executive director of the Y, is
the son of one of my closest friends.

Many studies have
shown helping others makes you happy. Volunteers may also live longer, manage
their pain better and lower their blood pressure more than those who don’t
volunteer.

Behavioral economists
write about the “warm glow” effect. If you’re generous with your time, talents or
money, you’re likely to report higher levels of well-being.

It may be all in your
head, literally. Acts of generosity activate a part of the brain linked to
happiness, a Swiss study released last summer found.

Participants were
promised about $26 a week for four weeks. Half were asked to commit to spending
the money on someone else and half on themselves. After deciding how they’d
spend the money, the subjects received MRI scans and answered questions.

People spending the
money on others reported feeling happier than those who were treating
themselves. The scans showed generosity triggered a response in a part of the
brain related to happiness.

Interestingly, this
happened even though the participants never actually received or spent any
money. And it didn’t matter how much they planned to give.

“You don’t need to
become a self-sacrificing martyr to feel happier. Just being a little more
generous will suffice,” said Phillipe Tobler, one of the researchers.

On this Giving
Tuesday, we can all make ourselves feel better by acting on our values and
priorities.

Thursday, November 16, 2017

A great American tradition is again about to take
place -- and I don’t mean overeating, arguing over politics, watching football
and shopping.

Before those time-honored Thanksgiving rituals, the
president of the United States will issue a couple of pardons everybody can
agree on.

If all goes according to plan, two photogenic and well-behaved
turkeys from Minnesota will be driven to the nation’s capital. They will spend
the night in a luxury hotel before being delivered Tuesday to the White House,
where President Donald Trump will exercise his power to pardon.

The two lucky birds then will make the trip to
Virginia Tech, where they will join Tater and Tot, the turkeys President Barack
Obama pardoned last year, to live out their lives in a special enclosure called
“Gobbler’s Rest.”

Unlike the other 238 million turkeys raised in the
United States annually, these turkeys will never grace anyone’s dining room
table.

So, naturally, the question on Americans’ minds is: Will
the turkeys thank Trump?

This president loves to be thanked. You could say he demands
it. He asked in a tweet Wednesday whether the three UCLA basketball players
would say “thank you President Trump” for securing their freedom from a Chinese
jail.

The young men stupidly shoplifted in three stores in
China while on a team trip and got caught. “They were headed for 10 years in
jail!” Trump tweeted.

As presidents often do, he intervened and the three
were released. They did thank the president and the U.S. government. Trump then
tweeted “You’re welcome” and urged them to “give a big Thank you to President
Xi Jinping, who made your release possible and HAVE A GREAT LIFE!”

He also advised: “Be careful, there are many pitfalls
on the long and winding road of life!”

Speaking of pitfalls, it’s not true that Trump revoked
Obama’s turkey pardons and ordered the birds executed by firing squad. A satirical
website ran a “news” story to that effect earlier this year and gullible
readers have been spreading the fake news ever since.

But it’s not fake news that the feathered fortunates
traditionally spend the night before their White House appearance at the
historic Willard InterContinental Hotel, where the luxurious rooms cost upwards
of $350.

Rolls of brown paper,
pine shavings and plastic tape are involved in preparing for the guests, Time
magazine reported. No word yet on whether the new
hotel of choice will be Trump International on Pennsylvania Avenue.

When it comes to giving thanks, though, the pardoned
turkeys should be especially grateful to Virginia Tech.

Yes, Trump will pardon, but it would be news if he
didn’t. What happens next to the celebrity turkeys hasn’t been pretty.

The National Turkey Federation started giving
presidents a turkey for their Thanksgiving feast with Harry S Truman. John F.
Kennedy decided to send the turkey back to the farm in 1963, saying, “We’ll
just let this one grow.”

George H.W. Bush was the first president to use the
word pardon. He announced on Nov. 14 1989, the turkey had “been granted a
presidential pardon as of right now.”

Over the years, the freed turkeys were dispatched to Disneyland,
petting farms and Mount Vernon. Sad to say, wherever they went, they often died
months, or even days, later.

“The bird is bred for the table, not for longevity,”
Dean Norton, the director at Mount Vernon in charge of livestock, told CNN in
2013.

Fed a high-protein diet, the turkeys grow large but
their organs can’t keep up. They can’t fly or roost in trees like wild turkeys
and don’t live as long, he said.

That’s why the turkey federation sends two turkeys
every year – in case one falls ill before the big White House event.

The federation contacted Tech last year and said it
wanted to start a tradition of sending pardoned turkeys to universities with
strong poultry science departments, the Roanoke Times reported.

Tech’s Poultry Science Club built the enclosure in a
show barn in Blacksburg and welcomed Tater and Tot about a year ago. Faculty
credit the students’ good care with keeping the turkeys alive and thriving.

Wednesday, November 8, 2017

After the latest mass shooting, President Donald Trump
and GOP politicians, including Virginia gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie, once
again sent their thoughts and prayers to victims and their families.

It was, as always, too soon to talk about gun policy,
they agreed.

But with 26 dead and 20 more wounded in Sutherland
Springs, Texas, last Sunday, just 35 days after a shooting massacre in Las
Vegas claimed 58 lives, prayer, while comforting, wasn’t enough for many
Americans.

“Let’s not pray,” the Rev. Robert C. Wright, Episcopal
bishop of the Diocese of Atlanta, said in a Facebook post widely circulated on
social media.

“Please do not invite me to pray in response to the
horror of Sutherland Springs, Texas, unless it is to pray courage over elected
officials who intend to work for the ban of automatic and semi-automatic
weapons,” he said.

People feel powerless following gun violence; it’s
human nature to want to respond and fix things, said comedian and social
commentator Stephen Colbert.

“Five thousand years ago, if your village had a tiger
coming into it every day and was eating people, you wouldn’t do nothing. You
would move the village, you would build a fence or you would kill the tiger,”
Colbert said on the Late Show Monday.

“You wouldn’t say, `Well, I guess someone’s gonna get
eaten every day because the price of liberty is tigers.’ You take some action,”
he said. “You can go vote. Vote for someone who will do something.”

Most Americans must wait for congressional mid-term
elections next year to vote. So all eyes Tuesday were on state races in
Virginia and New Jersey.

In Virginia, whose lax gun laws have supplied weapons
to criminals from Baltimore to New York City, voters had a clear choice for
governor between Democrat Ralph Northam, who advocates tougher guns laws, and Gillespie,
a strong ally of the NRA.

After the Texas shooting, Gillespie was on Fox News talking
about prayer for victims and his “A” rating and endorsement from the NRA.

Northam has said thoughts and prayers aren’t enough. Proud
of his “F” rating from the NRA, he called for universal background checks for
gun buyers, an assault weapons ban and smaller ammunition clips. He promised to
reinstate the one-gun-a-month limit on gun purchases.

Northam beat Gillespie 54 to 45 percent.

To be sure, gun policy was only one issue in the
campaign, but it was a significant factor. When asked to rank five issues,
voters cited health care first by a wide margin, followed by gun policy as No.
2. Those who chose gun policy as their top issue split evenly between Northam
and Gillespie.

But among voters with a gun in their home, 37 percent voted
for Northam, as did 73 percent of those who didn’t own guns.

“We as a society need to stand up and say it’s time to
take action and stop talking,” Northam said at a forum in October.

He had the support of Americans for Responsible
Solutions, the gun control group founded by former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords who
was shot in her home district in Arizona, and the Everytown for Gun Safety
Action Group, funded by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Northam campaigned with Lori Haas, whose daughter survived
being shot twice at Virginia Tech in 2007. Haas is state director of the
Coalition to Stop Gun Violence.

Gillespie promised to uphold Second Amendment rights
and to reverse the ban on guns in state government buildings imposed by Democratic
Gov. Terry McAuliffe. Four years ago, McAuliffe touted
his “F” rating from the NRA, as did Tim Kaine when he won his race for
governor.

Recounts in several districts will determine which
party controls the House, but Democrats already have erased much of the Republican
advantage with the election of political newcomers.

Among them is Chris Hurst of the Blacksburg area, who said
the fatal shooting of his fiancée, fellow journalist Alison Parker, on live
television two years ago was one reason he entered politics.

Virginians showed Tuesday voters can choose prayers
and policy. They’re counting on Northam and the General Assembly to deliver concrete
action to stop gun violence, and the nation will be watching.

Thursday, November 2, 2017

When my
church in Alexandria made the news, I knew it would be a bumpy ride.

The historic
Episcopal church, after months of soul-searching, announced Oct. 26 it would
relocate from the sanctuary two marble plaques memorializing George Washington
and Robert E. Lee, its most famous members.

It may not
surprise you that some media reports overly simplified and exaggerated the turn
of events.

Headlines
trumpeted: “Cultural terrorism comes to Christ Church in Alexandria” and
“George Washington’s church to tear down memorial honoring first president.”

Blogs
referred to “ripping out” the memorial to Washington the church now finds
“offensive.”

Asked about
the plaques in a TV interview, John Kelly, President Donald Trump’s chief of
staff, criticized the decision and praised Lee as an honorable man.

Corey
Stewart, chairman of the Prince William Board of Supervisors and a Republican
candidate for Senate next year, and others decried political correctness.

“The next
thing . . . is that they would take the name Christ off the name of this
church,” Stewart declared in a news conference outside the church.

Let’s take a
breath here.

After Christ
Church opened in 1773, Washington was one of the early worshippers and had a family
pew. His adopted son, George Washington Parke Custis, gave the church one of Washington’s
Bibles after he died.

Lee could
walk to church from his boyhood home a few blocks away. He and two of his
daughters were confirmed in the church in 1853, and Lee attended Sunday morning
services April 21, 1861, after he resigned his commission in the U.S. Army.

His eldest
daughter, Mary Custis Lee, left the church $10,000 for its endowment when she
died in 1918.

The church installed
the two plaques -- “In Memory of George Washington” and “In Memory of Robert
Edward Lee” – on either side of the altar two months after Lee died in October 1870.

President
Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill saw the plaques when
they worshipped on New Year’s Day 1942. Over the years, so did Presidents Eisenhower,
Johnson, Ford, Carter, Reagan and both Bushes when they visited.

In the
decade I’ve been a member, there’s been a growing uneasiness among the largely
white parish that the prominent Lee plaque discourages black people from
becoming part of the church.

Then, white
nationalist Richard Spencer moved to Old Town Alexandria, and the horrible events
in Charlottesville last summer brought the matter to a head.

The vestry unanimously
decided “the plaques create a distraction in our worship space and may create
an obstacle to our identity as a welcoming church . . . Accordingly the plaques
will be relocated no later than the summer of 2018.”

Emily Bryan,
senior warden of the church, told parishioners last Sunday: “Today, the legacy
of slavery and of the Confederacy is understood differently than it was in
1870. For some, Lee symbolizes the attempt to overthrow the Union and to
preserve slavery . . . The plaques in our sanctuary make some in our presence
feel unsafe or unwelcome.”

Where my
church stumbled was in not having a new location already chosen, so outsiders would
see we aren’t trying to hide our history. A committee will decide where on the
church campus to put the plaques.

Remaining
unchanged in the sanctuary will be Washington’s box pew, the plaque marking his
funeral, silver markers for Washington and Lee on the pews and communion rail,
and other references to the two men.

In the churchyard,
Confederate soldiers in a mass grave will remain undisturbed.